the unreliable author

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.” -George Orwell, “Why I Write“

Philip Roth says it sucks to be a writer. Elizabeth Gilbert says it’s the best job ever (of course, if you go flitting around the world eating, loving, and praying on a book advance, you can’t have too much to complain about). Who wins?

Avi Steinberg, who explained on The New Yorker blog that Roth’s warning to a young writer was a way of toughening him up, making sure he’s ready and willing to enter the guild.

“That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’ ” You don’t enter into it because it’s a great lifestyle decision—it isn’t—you do it because, for whatever reason, you believe in it, and you believe in it because, for whatever reason, you need to believe in it.”

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Well, really there’s just one main way that I love an editor: when she improves my work and publishes me!

No, that’s not true. I also love when editors tell me that my work is shit–actually that can be ten times more helpful. Ah, editors. Sometimes you want desperately to impress them (story pitches!), other times (when you’ve made a factual error or you’re past deadline–which I never am because I’m crazy about deadlines) you want to run and hide where they can’t find you (i.e. phone in airplane mode).

And still other times, like the evening of Wednesday, February 20th, you want to hear them talk on a panel convened by the Writers’ Institute at the Grad Center. In particular, you want to do this while sipping complimentary wine and nibbling at noshes (ack, I kind of hate that word; oh, well) like sushi, which is often present at Writers’ Institute events. If you don’t know what the Writers’ Institute is, I can tell you that it is awesome and you should come check it out; I’ll tell you more about how awesome it is when they hire me to do their PR in exchange for a tuition remission, hint hint Mr. Institute Director Dude, also known as Andre.

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